On this page I am reflecting on my past and future goals in education, and on my graduate studies' impact on my practice.
Read these reflections in connection to one another, or as stand-alone pieces.
Read these reflections in connection to one another, or as stand-alone pieces.
Saul Steinberg: Untitled
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ReflectinG on My Evolving GoalsEver since my first informal attempts at tutoring mathematics in college, the simplicity and clarity of math has drawn me to share it with those that don’t grasp it. Since then, imperceptibly at the beginning, then with determination, I was driven toward a career in mathematics education. Having earned my bachelor’s degree in sociology, before entering MSU’s Master of Art in Education program in the fall of 2013, I had no formal training as a teacher; therefore when I entered the program my foremost objective was to establish the formal foundations of my career as an educator. At that time among my learning goals were to gain greater knowledge of classroom management strategies, to improve my lesson-design skills, and to have a better knowledge of theories of education. As I would put it now, I simply wanted to know more about teaching. Improving my teaching skills is still my most important professional goal, but the details of this objective have become better defined and their focus has shifted during the past two years. Instead of keeping my students on task with classroom management strategies, now my goal is to motivate them to learn. Improved lesson-design is still on my agenda, but while in the past this meant focus on presenting subject content, today my goal is to make my lessons relevant to the specific students I teach in the given session. I also notice that in the past my conception of teaching was centered on how I, the teacher, interact with the subject content, while today my aim is to facilitate my students to explore the subject content for themselves. This shift in my perspective came gradually as through my studies I became acquainted with the principles of active learning that put the learner in the center of educational design. In hindsight, I see how far I have evolved in these past three years. Seeing my past goals as somewhat naive is a proof of my evolving understanding of teaching. I enjoy solving a range of mathematical problems, especially when I can find “my own way” to the problem solution. This creative problem solving inspires my teaching as well. As in the past, for my classroom motto I still a quote George Pólya for my students: “A great discovery solves a great problem but there is a grain of discovery in the solution of any problem. Your problem may be modest; but if it challenges your curiosity and brings into play your inventive faculties, and you solve it by your own means, you may experience the tension and enjoy the triumph of discovery.” I hold this idea in great regard, and I encourage my students to be intellectual risk takers who value creative approaches to mathematical problems. I believe that the only meaningful way of learning science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM subjects) is by building the learner’s own understanding of the concepts and problem solving processes involved; teaching these subjects must serve the same objective. The quantity and complexity of the material presented in a typical high-school mathematics course is so vast that learning by memorization does not produce the desired contextual knowledge that students will need as lifelong learners. Learning and understanding are inseparable concepts, my goal is to teach mathematics for understanding. |
directions for my future as a learner At the conclusion of my master’s degree program at Michigan State University, at the age of thirty-seven years, I still find it hard to envision something specific for my professional future. I tend to think of the directions I take in life, but not of exact outcomes I must achieve. Nonetheless, a course must be charted even if not adhered to. Three of my professional development goals for the future that I can think of now are: (1) I would like to be better able to teach according to my true knowledge and beliefs; (2) I would like to improve my knowledge of mathematics and combine it with some technical application; and (3) as a more distant tentative goal, I would like to move towards becoming an adult educator.
Designing a course that effectively promotes the learning of subject contents, cognitive and learning skills, as well as the values that should be coupled with the ethical use of the learner’s knowledge, is a complex task. More often than not, the teacher ends up making serious compromises between the content-related course objectives, and others that he personally feels important for the learners to achieve. Compromises like these are frequently necessitated by educational context, but just as often they derive from the teacher’s inability to turn his espoused theory of education into his theory in use. As I reflect on my teaching skills, I realize that a sizable amount of my theoretical knowledge of education, as well as my beliefs about education’s purpose, don’t always actualize in my daily practice. At times this is due to lack of effort, but more often this is lack of experience and deeper systemic vision in my planning and practice. My goal in this regard would be to gradually become able to put a fuller extent of my knowledge and beliefs into teaching action. Reading Parker Palmer's The Courage to Teach is a great starting point for teachers who wish to turn their professional practice into their vocation as much as I do. Being a mathematics teacher I obviously need to be knowledgeable about school-mathematics. As the secondary level mathematics curricula become increasingly more advanced, in the case of ambitious high school programs even extending to what previously were considered college level topics, the teacher must constantly add to his conceptual knowledge and problem solving skills. So, my second goal is to keep learning mathematics. I also want to learn some technical application of maths that I could use to integrate my students’ concept knowledge with practical uses of mathematics, whether science or engineering related. One practical step toward achieving this goal is to use the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) for instruction design. With the use of NGSS becoming prevalent in middle an high school level course design, mathematics education would become more enjoyable for learners and teachers alike. As a teacher I like to teach by engaging my students in collective thinking. I teach best if I can engage myself in thinking and problem solving on the spot. Properly done, this results in students’ discovery style learning. I find this a fruitful learning method especially for older students, such as emerging adults and adults, rather than middle and high school students. For this reason, I see myself as tending toward adult education; the million dollar question for now is: just what would I teach to adults? So for now, my current biggest long-term professional challenge is to find my way toward adult education, not approached as a teacher-educator, but rather from a field of expertise that I still need to find and perfect; this will probably be an interdisciplinary field. As I look at my current position in life I realize that less than a decade ago I could have hardly foreseen where I would be as I write these lines in February, 2016. I am glad that my life does not progress along the lines of clear goals and strict convictions about what my place in the future should be. Therefore, I view my goals as orientations that guide me rather than anything set in stone. With my future goals all centered around learning, whether it is learning to teach, learning maths, or learning to become an adult educator, I feel secure in my prospects while maintaining the freedom of choice education provides. |
Image by Zoltan Raffai
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CAME FAR, BUT NOT DONE YET,
The synthesis of my graduate studies
I first started
contemplating to enroll in a graduate program of education in 2010. At that
time all I knew was that I wanted to study at an English language university,
probably American. Since I wasn’t familiar with online graduate programs I had
to do a long search and selection process, finally I found Michigan State
University and decided that the Master of Arts in Education (MAED) was the
right program for me. At that time I was relatively new to the teaching
profession and didn’t have a solid formal background neither in theories of
education nor did I have much experience in teaching whole classes of students
in formal school settings. In the early period of my career, around 2005, I
taught based on my experiences as a high school student. My approach then was
based on reflections on what I liked in my past teachers and what I didn’t and
what models of classroom practices resulted in learning and what seemed to be a
just a waste of time. This was also the time when I systematically reviewed,
re-learned, and made sense for myself from the instructor’s perspective of the
advanced level topics of secondary school mathematics. I enjoyed this period in
my work very much, unburdened from theories and prescribed methods, untroubled
by school teachers’ administrative duties, I was free to teach based only on my
convictions of what is worth knowing and what education should focus on.
Self-guided, the foundations of my philosophy of education were condensing out
of the primal fog of intense and instinctive opposition to the practices of
education I was put through as a child, combined with an equally intense love
for the improvement of my intellect and those of my students’.
Some of my most memorable learning experiences are connected to the courses whose topics I most enjoyed learning; these were also the courses in which, based by my measure, I produced my best work. The first of these was ED 860 - Concepts of a Learning Society, instructed by Dr. Steven Weiland. This excellent course is very traditional in its design, consisting of simple reading and writing tasks. I enjoyed learning in this course because my background in sociology made the sociology of education concepts easy to grasp, as well as because I found the proposed topics about the learning society diverse and intellectually engaging. ED 860 gave me the broad insight into the sociological contexts of education that helped my learning in subsequent courses. One of these was TE 822 - Issues of Culture in Classroom and Curriculum, a course that focused on practices of multicultural education.
Perhaps my favorite learning experiences are connected to my activities in CEP 818 - Creativity in Teaching and Learning, instructed by Dr. Mishra and Rohit. I was more genuinely involved in the exercises assigned in this course than in any other, and this true involvement has produced very positive results. As proposed by the course designer, I became a creative learner and teacher during that fall semester; to show the products of my work to a wider audience I built my first website during that semester. Most of the items you see under the showcase section of this portfolio were my first website's original content. The principles of learning and teaching taught in CEP 818 are close to me because through the application of directed creativity they promise the same freedom in teaching and learning that I experienced in my early years as an educator. Similarly to most of the other courses I took in the program, in this one I learned about course design, but I did so from a distinctly different angle. I learned to awaken my own creativity by breaking it down to its components, enhancing it through reflection, and then putting it back together applied to instructional design.
EAD 866 - Teaching in Postsecondary Education gave me the most systematic and in-depth view into instructional design. This was also the course that acquainted me with principles of learner centered education. I first read Barr and Tagg’s From Teaching to Learning in EAD 866, which I found one of the clearest and most concise argument for learner centered education in the higher education context. I was also very impressed by Dr. Dirkx's course because I found that everything I was learning about learner centered instructional design throughout the semester was built into the course structure itself. I felt that the structure and process of my learning was the very same thing as the content of my learning. I produced some of my best writing in Dr. Dirkx’s course, and surely I was very motivated and intellectually stimulated by his instruction.
I enjoyed TE 861B - Inquiry, Nature of Science and Technology because ever since I was much younger I was passionate about the epistemology of science. The course was great, though it focused more on education that on the nature of scientific or scientific reasoning. I am glad to have been introduced to Latour and Woolgar’s Laboratory Life (see more about this in the writing samples section of my portfolio), and enjoyed reading, thinking, and writing about the sociology of science. This is one of the interdisciplinary fields that best suits my knowledge base and my rational idiosyncrasies.
What did I learn during the three years of my graduate studies? One thing is sure, I learned way too much to describe it all in this brief essay. Broadly speaking what I learned is separable into theoretical and practical aspects of education. The first of these is the wide contextual picture of education, including the sociological and philosophical aspects of education, its societal functions and purposes, the great body of theories that underpins practical concerns of teaching and learning. The second area is the practice of instructional planning, according to different perspectives and embedded too many contexts, from program planning, through course design, all the way down to the planning of lessons, learning sessions, and short instructional activities.
Some of my most memorable learning experiences are connected to the courses whose topics I most enjoyed learning; these were also the courses in which, based by my measure, I produced my best work. The first of these was ED 860 - Concepts of a Learning Society, instructed by Dr. Steven Weiland. This excellent course is very traditional in its design, consisting of simple reading and writing tasks. I enjoyed learning in this course because my background in sociology made the sociology of education concepts easy to grasp, as well as because I found the proposed topics about the learning society diverse and intellectually engaging. ED 860 gave me the broad insight into the sociological contexts of education that helped my learning in subsequent courses. One of these was TE 822 - Issues of Culture in Classroom and Curriculum, a course that focused on practices of multicultural education.
Perhaps my favorite learning experiences are connected to my activities in CEP 818 - Creativity in Teaching and Learning, instructed by Dr. Mishra and Rohit. I was more genuinely involved in the exercises assigned in this course than in any other, and this true involvement has produced very positive results. As proposed by the course designer, I became a creative learner and teacher during that fall semester; to show the products of my work to a wider audience I built my first website during that semester. Most of the items you see under the showcase section of this portfolio were my first website's original content. The principles of learning and teaching taught in CEP 818 are close to me because through the application of directed creativity they promise the same freedom in teaching and learning that I experienced in my early years as an educator. Similarly to most of the other courses I took in the program, in this one I learned about course design, but I did so from a distinctly different angle. I learned to awaken my own creativity by breaking it down to its components, enhancing it through reflection, and then putting it back together applied to instructional design.
EAD 866 - Teaching in Postsecondary Education gave me the most systematic and in-depth view into instructional design. This was also the course that acquainted me with principles of learner centered education. I first read Barr and Tagg’s From Teaching to Learning in EAD 866, which I found one of the clearest and most concise argument for learner centered education in the higher education context. I was also very impressed by Dr. Dirkx's course because I found that everything I was learning about learner centered instructional design throughout the semester was built into the course structure itself. I felt that the structure and process of my learning was the very same thing as the content of my learning. I produced some of my best writing in Dr. Dirkx’s course, and surely I was very motivated and intellectually stimulated by his instruction.
I enjoyed TE 861B - Inquiry, Nature of Science and Technology because ever since I was much younger I was passionate about the epistemology of science. The course was great, though it focused more on education that on the nature of scientific or scientific reasoning. I am glad to have been introduced to Latour and Woolgar’s Laboratory Life (see more about this in the writing samples section of my portfolio), and enjoyed reading, thinking, and writing about the sociology of science. This is one of the interdisciplinary fields that best suits my knowledge base and my rational idiosyncrasies.
What did I learn during the three years of my graduate studies? One thing is sure, I learned way too much to describe it all in this brief essay. Broadly speaking what I learned is separable into theoretical and practical aspects of education. The first of these is the wide contextual picture of education, including the sociological and philosophical aspects of education, its societal functions and purposes, the great body of theories that underpins practical concerns of teaching and learning. The second area is the practice of instructional planning, according to different perspectives and embedded too many contexts, from program planning, through course design, all the way down to the planning of lessons, learning sessions, and short instructional activities.